Multi-view display systems wherein a user may be presented with a plurality of views of a scene are receiving increasing interest and significant research is undertaken in how to provide such multi-view experiences.
A popular application of multi-view display systems is three dimensional (3D) displays which add a third dimension to the viewing experience by providing a viewer's two eyes with different views of the scene that is being watched.
The field of 3D video and image rendering is evolving very rapidly these days. For example, 3D films are becoming increasingly prevalent in cinemas and 3D content is beginning to become available in the home via e.g. the BluRay 3D standard, HDMI 1.4 standard with 3D support, 3D enabled gaming consoles, computer graphics cards, and 3D television broadcasting, etc. Indeed, currently a number of 3D televisions are being introduced to the general consumer market. These televisions are typically based on fast Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) panels with shutter glasses. This time sequential active shutter technology has a number of advantages including low cost implications, no impact on the two-dimensional performance of the display, and the support of full High Definition in 3D. The perceived 3D quality is mainly driven by the basic two dimensional image quality, the amount of cross-talk between images (i.e. how much of the left image is visible with the right eye and vice versa), the amount of flicker, and the amount of light output.
However, these requirements tend to be conflicting requirements and suboptimal trade-offs are typically required. Specifically, current displays have relatively slow response times and therefore the image frame rate must be kept relatively low to ensure that the display has time to adjust to new pixel values. The response time is typically in the order of 4-8 msecs which result in most practical displays being limited to image frequencies of around 120 Hz. However, even at this rate, the response times is rarely sufficiently low to avoid some distortion of the two dimensional images and this may results in some quality degradation.
Furthermore, for a 3D display that alternates images for the viewer's two eyes, an image frequency of 120 Hz results in an image frequency for each eye of 60 Hz. Thus, each shutter of the shutter glasses switch between transparent and opaque with a frequency of 60 Hz. However, the resulting 60 Hz flickering is noticeable to the typical viewer and may significantly degrade the perceived quality and user experience.
Hence, an improved multi-view display system would be advantageous and in particular a system allowing increased flexibility, improved trade-off between requirements, reduced flickering, increased image quality, facilitated implementation and/or improved performance would be advantageous.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,979,033 A discloses a stereoscopic video system and method in which left and right images are displayed during alternate fields of a video picture frame by means of a display and shutter elements.
EP 2 015 589 Al discloses a stereoscopic projection display system with scanning of light valves.